Watershed from propagated markers: An interactive method to morphological object segmentation in image sequences

In this paper, it is introduced an interactive method to object segmentation in image sequences, by combining classical morphological segmentation with motion estimation – the watershed from propagated markers. In this method, the objects are segmented interactively in the first frame and the mask generated by its segmentation provides the markers that will be used to track and segment the object in the next frame. Besides the interactivity, the proposed method has the following important characteristics: generality, rapid response and progressive manual edition. This paper also introduces a new benchmark to do quantitative evaluation of assisted object segmentation methods applied to image sequences. The evaluation is done according to several criteria such as the robustness of segmentation and the easiness to segment the objects through the sequence.